Juan Williams: Obama's Daunting Demographic Message for the GOP

Juan Williams is a political analyst for Fox News and a columnist for the Hill.

...The first American political party, the Federalists, became overly dependent on a small, wealthy class of political elites based in the Northeast. As the nation expanded, they were eventually overtaken by the more populist Democratic-Republicans with a strong base in the growing American South.

Similarly, before the Civil War, the Whigs were a major political party based in the North who opposed Andrew Jackson's Democratic Party. Abraham Lincoln began his career as a Whig. They joined the new Republican Party and strengthened the cause of abolition.

After the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Southern Democrats, known as the Dixiecrats, left their party for the Republican Party. They helped to transform the South from a reliably Democratic to a GOP stronghold, giving us Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Bush.

Now the cycles of history have turned against the GOP. The 2008 and 2012 Obama coalitions are no longer the exception to electoral politics. They are the new rule....